The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to an environment of sensors, monitors, and other devices, typically different from traditional desktop, laptop and server computers, which are capable of connecting to the public internet or to other packet-based networks. As the IoT expands, and more and more devices are connected, the number of endpoints will reach well into the billions. Managing these endpoints will be a complex task and there is a particular need to find ways for these devices to be managed, configured and operated upon in a seamless manner with the least amount of device-specific work by computers.
One management task that will be unable to be performed manually, due to time constraints, is generating an ontology that categorizes, classifies or maps the capabilities, constraints, relationships, context and functionality of large numbers of diverse devices. An example might be an office building that contains thousands of sensors and actuators for monitoring HVAC systems, security or other physical operations; for all these devices to be easily usable by automated systems, they need to be organized into a meaningful logical hierarchy that addresses both function and location. An ontology is a categorization plan that organizes the properties, types, relationships, and other aspects of an entity. In the past, developing formal ontologies through computer programming has been tedious and time-consuming because each ontology must capture a large amount of domain-specific knowledge that may be only mentally known. Typically this required domain experts to spend a great deal of time with bespoke tools. Methods are needed to automatically generate ontologies for a network of many different types of devices with different classes and capabilities.